This chapter develops a toolkit of neoclassical macroeconomic models, and applies these models to the US economy from 1929 to 2014. We first filter macroeconomic time series into business cycle and long-run components, and show that the long-run component is typically much larger than the...

Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) is a government-sponsored microfinance program. The scheme is based on four features: group lending with joint liability, progressive lending, back-ended subsidy, and social capital. We propose a new model of SGSY having these features: group lending...

Using real-time data, we analyze how the systematic expectation errors of professional forecasters in 19 advanced economies depend on the state of the business cycle. Our results indicate that the general result that forecasters systematically overestimate output growth (across all countries)...

In a recent paper (quot;A Primer on the Economics and Time Series Econometrics of Wealth Effects,quot; 2001), Davis and Palumbo investigate the empirical relation between three cointegrated variables: aggregate consumption, asset wealth, and labor income. Although cointegration implies that an...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on economic growth in the presence of fiscal consolidation in South Africa. Markov-switching dynamic regression (MSDR) and time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) were performed using time series data from 1994 to...

This paper proposes a new approach for analyzing the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the income distribution. The conventional method of analysis is regression of summary inequality indices on variables such as the unemployment and inflation rates. Building on the lessons from...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of time series filtered by the (CF2003) filter. I show that in the presence of a stochastic trend the Christiano-Fitzgerald filter imposes spurious periodicity onto the series, i. e. the filter imparts cyclicality where there is none. This is due to a...